


The Stronger Wind

by conceptofzero



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-14
Updated: 2015-01-14
Packaged: 2018-03-07 13:22:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3174796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/conceptofzero/pseuds/conceptofzero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The desert is not kind. PM keeps moving forward anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Stronger Wind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SakoAkarui](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SakoAkarui/gifts).



PM smells the dead long before she sees them. In the desert, scents travel far. There’s almost never anything else in the way to dampen them, and the winds are always blowing here and there, carrying smells over desert dunes and across the sea of sand. Once, she wouldn’t have known what that smell meant. But she was there the day Prospit’s moon crashed into the Battlefield. She had stood there with two crowns in one hand and a sword in the other, with the rank smell of death crawling over the checkerboard lands. 

She knows this smell all too well. 

The bandages around her mouth help dampen the worst of it and kept the foul stink of death from creeping into her mouth. Her water stays safely capped and away as she makes her way towards it. PM is careful of course, keeping her sword near and stopping to bury her foot supply when she gets close, in case this is a trap and she needs to run. 

It’s no trap. This becomes all too clear as she climbs over a dune and sees the battleship crashed in the sands. It split at some point while it was still moving, either when it crashed into the ground or shortly after, before it came to a final resting place. Bodies litter the sands, and the smell is from them rotting in the hot desert air, turning to a unforgiving slurry within their shells. 

She looks from them to the ship and steels herself, heading closer. There might be survivors. There might be supplies. 

PM finds the remains of what were the shipwrecked survivors. She makes herself look at the bloody mess, noting that it was no accident what happened here. The little ones look like they’re sleeping. Someone wrapped them in blankets and closed their eyes. PM finds it hardest to make herself look at them and their still little bodies and the dried blood on the blankets. The adults are easier. The last one alive starts sightlessly ahead, bloody hands set in their lap. The blanket on their shoulders is mostly clean. She takes that one with a quiet apology and heads into the wreckage of the ship. 

There’s not much here, but she finds some water and a piece of metal she can make a crude sled out of. It’ll do for now. PM heads away from the ship to fetch her food, and then to put distance between her and the bodies. 

It takes her two days of walking before the smell of the dead leaves her nose. 

-

Sometimes, she dreams she’s still on Prospit. The dreams don’t always come when she sleeps. There are times when she’s walking through the golden sands and her brain tells her that it’s Prospit again, and she believes it. 

The water’s long gone. So’s the food. So’s even the sled, left behind when she had nothing left to drag behind her but the metal. The thirst is something she’s grown familiar with. Not used to, never used to, but… familiar. Like a pain that never leaves. Like something caught in your throat that no amount of coughing can budge. Her stomach has stopped growling, though now and then, it sends a sharp pain up her side, a reminder that she’s empty and even the sand is looking good these days.

Mostly though, it looks like gold. PM walks, and she finds herself making her way across uneven palace floors. Her body moves and her mind takes her into places that no longer exist. When she’s dreaming, she doesn’t know it. It all feels real. It all feels right. Her legs carry her forward and she sees other Prospitians all around her. She knows their faces and their laughter, and she smiles as they pass one another on their way to their assigned posts. 

Sometimes, they even talk. The painter who did the murals, the one who work a handsome kerchief on her head and always carried a bucket of paint, she walks beside PM often and they talk to each other. They were never really friends on Prospit, but when PM sees her, she remembers how much she liked the few times she and MP talked. 

“Don’t worry too much about this stuff,” Ms Paint tells her. Her bucket swings by her side and she walks quick to keep up with PM, her short legs taking two steps for every single step PM takes. “Everything passes with time. Just keep moving forward.” 

“I’m not sure I know how to stop.” PM tried the once. She found a cave and knelt inside and thought she could just lie there and wait for death. But after a few minutes, she found it all intolerable. There had to be a better place to pass on than a dingy cave. So she kept moving, as if that was the only alternative available to her. “I’m just going to fall one day.” 

“I’ll be there to pick you up.” Ms Paint says. She smiles, and PM smiles back. But when she steps forward, the metal melts into sand, and Ms Paint is gone. PM remembers too late that she’s dead. Prospit burned and Prospit died and she stood on the Battlefield and the wind carried the smell of her fallen moon to her, along with the smell of a million dead bodies. There’s nobody else left alive. 

She staggers through the desert, hoping that the sinking sands stop swallowing her feet and ankles whole and turn once more into smooth golden stone to support her and lead her back home. 

-

In the sands, she finds the White Queen. She stands tall and proud under the sun, looking as stiff as if she has been cut from stone. Her hands stay clasped and she calls to PM as she makes her way through the endless sands. 

“Parcel Mistress. Come to me.” She’s wearing her Queen’s uniform but her head is bare and empty, her crown gone. PM moves towards her. She doesn’t dare stop moving, or else she might fall into the sand and maybe this time, they’ll wash over her and swallow her body whole. Once, she woke with the sands trying to do just that, swallowing her up while she slept and trying to crawl into her mouth and nose. It had been hard to sleep after that. 

When she approaches the White Queen, she finally comes to a shaky stop, her legs burning and her knees wobbling dangerously. WQ looked pristine from a distance, but up close, PM can see how her shell has been worn away by the desert, leaving ugly rough patches and flaking away at it until there are holes right through her. The line shines in the holes and PM brings her hands to her face to cover her mouth. Oh her Queen, her Queen… 

“You did your duty well. Have faith.” The White Queen says. The light filters out of the holes in her chest, in her arms and her face. Her eyes are white as she is and her body is hard when PM sags against her, resting her head on WQ’s chest. “Time will prove us right.” 

PM’s chest tightens and she sobs, but it hurts so much. She hasn’t had water in days and she couldn’t cry even if she wanted to. The sobbing hurts her throat and her chest, and she slides down until she’s leaning against the White Queen’s legs and the sand crowds around her. When she looks up, the White Queen’s gone, and all that’s left is a while pillar full of holes. 

She could give up this time and mean it. PM knows that. She feels it in her bones. She could lie down in the sand and this time, she could close her eyes and let it take her. No more hallucinations. No more hunger pains. No more tasting metal for days on end as her mouth dries and dries until her tongue cracks. The White Queen said to have faith, but she’s not real. She’s dead. They’re all dead. Every single last person she ever knew died the day her world did. 

Her face rests against the pillar and the stone feels cool against her shell. Will anyone find her if she dies here? Will the smell of death warn others away from this place? She could just stay here until the last breath leaves her lungs. PM just might this time. 

Instead, she pulls herself to her feet, hands grabbing at the holes to use them as hand holds. She rises and she sets her eyes on the horizon. Have faith. Time will prove us right. 

PM keeps walking, leaving the pillar behind. She doesn’t bother looking back. There’s nothing behind her that’s worth seeing twice. 

\- 

She nearly falls into the well. PM walks through the remains of a settlement, and when the sand underfoot falls away and there’s the cracking of weary boards falling to pieces, she barely gets herself away from the hole in time. The sand and wood fall, but it’s the splashing sound they make that catches her mind and rips it back to the here and now. 

Water. That’s water. That’s a well, with water. 

Her mouth burns and her fingers feel dull and lifeless as she finds a length of telephone wire and an empty tin can in the ruins of what might have been a house. she strings the wire through two holes in the can and she ignores the way her hand hurts from pushing through the tin, or the way it tore at her shell when she tugged her hand out. And then, she lies on her stomach and carefully lowers the can over the hole and into the waters below. 

It takes her a few tries before she gets the can to go into the water and feels the wire suddenly weigh down as the water fills the can and pulls it down. She hauls it up with strength she was sure she had lost in the desert weeks ago, and though the can is half full and she can see sad and silt swishing around in it, she puts it to her mouth and greedily drinks every last drop. Then she does it again and again, fishing up water to drink until she can taste something other than hot metal for the first time in… … in… in a very long time. 

PM has to stop at one point, when she feels her stomach cramp and she remembers that he hasn’t had anything in it for so long that it’s gotten used to nothing. She moves away from the well and curls against the side of a remaining wall, shivering a little and barely keeping the water down. 

For the first time in a very, very long time, PM is hydrated enough to spend some time thinking about something other than simply moving forward. She’s hungry but she can find food out here if she looks hard enough. Water is trickier. But that well is fresh and she could set up a sort of home here, haul up water and hunt lizards or scorpions or centipedes, all which you could find lurking here and there. This place could be built into a sort of home, if she wished. 

Night’s coming and she manages to make herself a little shelter using bits left around the ruins of the house. A plastic table gives her a roof and she covers herself with the half-rotten remains of a tarp, sleeping better than she has since she reached this planet. No dreams, or at least none that she remembers when the sun rises and the light and heat wake her. 

She could stay here. But when she wakes, she already knows she won’t. There’s water in the well and she brings up as much as she can put in the cans and jugs she finds in the area. She goes scavenging and finds some old canned goods in another nearby structure. In another, she discovers a steel cart, and though it’s a little difficult to push through the sand, it will be perfect for carrying water in. 

PM finds the letter in the house at the end of what was once a road. Time has weathered the paper and turned it yellow, and the address has been turned into faint letterings that she has to squint to read. But it’s a letter. It’s a real letter, with a real address. The last time she held mail in her hands, she helped destroy her only home. She should feel horror to touch mail again, but instead, she feels a quiet peace spread through her. It’s been so long. It’s been too long. 

When she leaves, she takes as much water as she can carry and still push the cart through the sands. PM covers the well’s surface and marks it for her to find if she ever returns, or for someone else to find, if anyone else is still alive out here. The letter sits safely up in the child seat, where the water can’t slosh onto it by accident or ruin it. She glances at it now and again as she moves forward through the sands. Maybe there will be other letters out there to find. Maybe someday soon, she can deliver them and help them reach the places they were meant to go. 

The wind carries a sweet smell on it. She heads into it.


End file.
